21 malnourished rabbits confiscated in Oakland CA
Megan Webb, director of the Oakland Animal Shelter, is now housing an additional 21 confiscated bunnies taken from a breeder who was raising them for their meat. The rabbits are available for adoption. Photo: Lance Iversen / The Chronicle.
On the heels of the urban faming craze, Oakland is embarking on a series of community meetings this summer to review its agriculture laws.
By Carolyn Jones
San Francisco Chronicle
June 30, 2011
Excerpt:
Oakland animal officials were scrambling Wednesday to find homes for 21 malnourished, deformed rabbits seized from a Lake Merritt area backyard, where they were being raised for food.
The bunny bust comes just as Oakland enters into the debate over urban agriculture regulations, deciding how to monitor livestock – its treatment and slaughter – in one of the country’s hotbeds of urban homesteading.
“This blurs the lines for animal cruelty. When is it OK to raise something for food, and when is it cruelty?” said Megan Webb, director of Oakland animal services. “This is an issue we’re all going to have to sort out.”
3 comments
These poor rabbits. Unfortunately, they are a poster picture of what can go wrong in rabbit raising.
All animals raised for food need to have good lives–not necessarily extravagant or spoiled, but there should be no suffering or malnutrition involved.
And when the time comes….they deserve a respectful, swift, and humane death using proven humane methods. In the original article, a supposedly knowledgeable person said that rabbits should be slaughtered by slitting the throat.
We strongly disagree. Unless done with an EXTREMELY sharp instrument, knowledge of anatomy, and absolutely impeccable technique, this method is highly susceptible to error, leading to inhumane suffering and fear for the animal.
Animals raised for food are still cared for by their owners; it is not at all an emotionless enterprise. Anyone who actively enjoys killing a domestic animal really needs therapy, posthaste.
There are certainly better and worse ways both to care for and to euthanize, and this is where education is sorely needed for all concerned, from the animal owner all the way up to the judges who may be presiding over abuse cases.
The information is out there–and the Rabbit Industry Council is happy to put people in contact with others who are learning and doing these things well. There are many mailing lists out there, notably Meatrabbits on Yahoogroups (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Meatrabbits/ )
which give out excellent information and do a great job of answering questions; there are websites like http://www.Raising-Rabbits.com, http://www.RudolphsRabbitRanch.com,
and many more; there is also the 4H extension office, which has available sound elementary information on the raising of rabbits for meat. And don’t forget your libraries! The book Rabbit Production (8th ed), by Cheeke, Patton, Lukefahr and McNitt is absolutely tops in the category of rabbit knowledge.
There is also the possibility of having publicly-available seminars on how to raise and process rabbits for food, something the RIC would be delighted to assist with. The Rabbit Industry Council produced a video on humane rabbit slaughter for home use which addresses many of the concerns involved in home food production, such as humane euthanasia, food handling tips, disease and more. (Available at http://www.battats.com/video)
Our goal is to help people raise rabbits–whether they be pets, meat, show or whatever–humanely and in a healthy fashion through promotion and education, after which communication and understanding improves.
Any questions may be sent to ric@rabbitindustrycouncil.com .
ric@rabbitindustrycouncil,
Thanks for the reasoned and informative response to an article about inhumane animal husbandry. Perhaps people keeping animals for meat might not give them the same level of care that they would give their pets but, like the stories we hear about cats and dogs starved and poorly housed, I suspect that this person in the article wouldn’t be much better with a family dog either.
I wonder if the general reading public think about intensive pork, beef and chicken farms? These may be legal, but hardly humane. Are the readers vegetarian? Do they think about the lives of the animals they buy for meat at the supermarket? What makes this an emotional story is that ‘bunnies are soft and fluffy’. What we need is humane rearing of all animals raised for meat. To accomplish this, we need to eat less meat, and be willing to pay more for organic methods. Having read Novella Carpenter’s book and blog, it’s abundantly clear she is a humane raiser of livestock.
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